SARASOTA, Fla. -- It was just about a year ago that Alex Kirilloff suffered the wrist injury that would rob him of so much time in 2019. He sprained his right wrist just before Double-A Pensacola broke camp, missed the first month of the season, and aggravated it after returning. In all, he played just 94 games.

So to see what Kirilloff did Thursday at Ed Smith Stadium, smacking an opposite-field home run in the ninth inning of a 3-3 tie with the Orioles, was a good sign for MLB Pipeline’s No. 32-ranked overall prospect.

“I think he feels good,” Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “We haven’t seen any signs of him being less than 100 percent here in camp. I think he’s happy with the way he’s feeling.”

This was the 22-year-old Kirilloff’s second homer of the spring. But he’s 6-for-10 overall, and it’s the quality of his at-bats -- his natural hit tool -- that has long stood out to evaluators and necessitated his 15th overall selection out of high school in the 2016 MLB Draft. This, too, has survived last year’s wrist woes.

“You can certainly see when he takes at-bats, he can do unusual and pretty gifted things with the bat,” Baldelli said. “You see him get to a lot of different pitches. And sometimes you see it within one at-bat, which is unusual. You might see a guy do something, but he’ll get to pitches all over the zone in the same at-bat and he finds a way to consistently do it. He’s fun to watch.”

D.R. travel plans
Dominican Republic natives Nelson Cruz -- who hit his third spring homer Thursday -- Miguel Sanó and Gilberto Celestino will be among the members of the Twins traveling to Santo Domingo for Saturday’s exhibition against the Tigers. Alex Avila, whose grandfather Ralph was a pioneer of the concept of team training academies in the Dominican and the Dominican Summer League, will also be going.

“That’s something my dad [Tigers GM Al Avila] talked about with this trip coming up,” Avila said. “Rocco asked me if I’d like to go and I thought it would be nice to go back and pay homage to my grandfather and everything that I learned while going over there as a kid.”

The Twins decided to exercise caution with shortstop and D.R. native Jorge Polanco, who wanted to go on the trip but is just getting back in the swing of things after offseason ankle surgery.

“We deemed it important that he stayed on his schedule and, if he did go down to the Dominican, it would probably set him back a few days, which we may not have to work with,” Baldelli explained. “So I know he was disappointed in some ways about not being able to go, but it was something that was taken out of his hands and something that, if we didn’t feel strongly about, we wouldn’t be going down this road.”

Bailey tunes up
The line -- a run on four hits with two strikeouts over three innings -- obviously didn’t matter. Rather than focus on the results of Thursday’s outing against the Orioles, starting pitcher Homer Bailey was more fixated on focus itself.

“Even though it's a Spring Training game, you still have to start working that part of your game, start feeling your legs, start finding that release point, maybe work on a few things,” he said. “But a lot of times I'll just leave that up to the catcher so I can kind of go off him and start trying to execute pitches, start feeling little things in your mechanics and also still get used to competition.”

Bailey threw 40 pitches, 30 for strikes.

“I think the main thing was get three up and downs, try to go through them as clean as you can,” he said. “It was really efficient. I like to work in the zone to out, don't want to walk people. I think I got behind in the count twice -- which, if you want to pick and choose something to find, there it is.”

Up next
With roughly half of the team headed to the Dominican Republic on Friday, it will be a lighter squad for Friday’s home game against the Rays at CenturyLink Sports Complex. Jhoulys Chacín will make the 12:05 p.m. CT start.